The news that Facebook has splurged $2bn (£1.2bn) on buying Oculus Rift, the world's first really viable virtual reality headset, has set off waves of plaintive snark in the world of videogames. Virtual reality headsets were supposed to be about totally immersive space battles or sword fighting simulations, not about peer-through simulacra of distant relatives' new kitchen windows. I mean, it's bad enough when Facebook friends have children and instantly change their profile picture to a baby photo, as though having regressed to mewling and puking infancy themselves. Imagine seeing that appalling phenomenon in the future Faceworld.

Facebook will probably not have reassured many observers with the despair-inducing management jargon of its announcement, wherein we learn excitedly that "Facebook plans to extend Oculus' existing advantage in gaming to new verticals including communications, media and entertainment, education and other areas." Pretty sure one of those other "verticals" is going to be advertising that is literally in your face.

Videogame players the world over who were so excited about the headset's promise of "surround sense" ultraviolence are now declaring as one: "Oculus Rift is dead to me." Markus Persson, creator of world-beating world-builder Minecraft, has announced that he is cancelling the version of that game he had planned to make for the headset. "Facebook creeps me out," he declared, via the medium of Twitter, the other giant social media corporation that funds itself with adverts. With commendable alacrity, meanwhile, the developers at art-game co-operative KOOPmode have already released a downloadable satire on how Facebook might work in 3D, graced with the irresistible tagline: "Scroll Facebook … with your face".

The problem is that Facebook is just not cool. And it seems to have a reverse Midas touch – or, according to the version of the myth related by Aristotle, a standard Midas touch (everything the king touched turned to gold, including his food, so he starved to death, apparently lacking the wit to engage a serving wench to spoonfeed him). When Facebook paid a knee-trembling $19bn last month for the messaging service WhatsApp – worth it, according to one plausible theory, because it lets Facebook peer into your phone contacts – a chorus of WhatsApp users immediately announced they were switching to rival products.

So why is Facebook on this buying spree? The media theorist Nathan Jurgenson reads it as "conspicuous acquisition", after Thorstein Verblen's notion of conspicuous consumption. "A conspicuous acquisition," Jurgenson writes, "doesn't exist to make money but is rather a luxury prop to demonstrate a certain type of corporate status." Facebook wants to be seen to appreciate cool stuff, and thus to acquire a cool reputation. Google has Glass; Facebook now has Oculus. We'll see if that makes people think Facebook is cool. In the meantime the announcement looks like very good news for Sony, who have recently announced its own virtual reality headset for the PlayStation 4 called Project Morpheus. (Named, I hope, after Laurence Fishburne's character in The Matrix rather than the Greek god of sleep, unless Sony plans to market it as an anti-insomnia therapy.)

The other story here is what the acquisition might mean for Kickstarter, which is where Oculus Rift got its original funding and dedicated fanbase. Kickstarter is supposed to be about hip indie projects that The Man won't fund, so if they are eventually sold to The Man after all, that is going to leave a sour taste and perhaps even exert a chilling effect on future projects. With this deal, Kickstarter might have lost its anti-corporate innocence.

Meanwhile, there seems to be an obvious question of economic justice here. The original Kickstarter backers of Oculus Rift might not have been explicitly granted shares in the company, but the company wouldn't exist without their initial contribution. About 10,000 people gave Oculus $2.5m between them. I for one am struggling to think of a good reason why each of them shouldn't get a proportional share of that $2bn sale.

The promise of being able one day to crouch drooling in a corner with goggles glued to your face while you repeatedly jab your "Like" finger into the eerily yielding faces of 3D virtual babies, doesn't seem like such a good deal by comparison.